Published in 1942. Collingwood's book on political thought & crisis.
The process of civilization would thus be one of asymptotic approximation to the ideal condition of civility.
The formulation of a general concept presupposes definite properties; only if there are fixed characteristics by virtue of which things may be recognized as similar or dissimilar, coinciding or not coinciding, is it possible to collect objects which resemble each other into a class. But—we cannot help asking at this point—how can such differentiae exist prior to language? Do we not, rather, realize them only by means of language, through the very act of naming them? And if the latter be the case, then by what rules and what criteria is this act carried out? What is it that leads or constrains language to collect just these ideas into a single whole and denote them by a word? What causes it to select, from the ever-flowing, ever-uniform stream of impressions which strike our senses or arise from the autonomous processes of the mind, certain pre-eminent forms, to dwell on them and endow them with a particular “significance”?
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
“Knowing that I could be painfully wrong and curiosity about why other smart people saw things differently prompted me to look at things through the eyes of others as well as my own. This allowed me to see many more dimensions than if I saw things just through my own eyes.”
In Wealth and Democracy, the political commentator Kevin Phillips uses examples and statistics to show that the last time we had similarly large numbers of corporate scandals was in the Gilded Age (the last three decades of the 19th century)—precisely when the flawed doctrine of Social Darwinism was most popular among the American elites.
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